Book review: The accomplishments and contradictions of Henry Ford

Quite often those we admire in youth evolve into something less palatable, yet even with that charismatic aegis corroded our adulation remains.

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By
Mike Freeman
Posted Jun. 15, 2013 @ 12:01 am

Quite often those we admire in youth evolve into something less palatable, yet even with that charismatic aegis corroded our adulation remains. Nick Carraway’s Jay Gatsby reflections inhabit this arc, and Richard Snow’s biography of Henry Ford "I Invented the Modern Age" comes off beautifully because of it.

Well-executed biography has tremendous range. History backdrops the character study, and an engrossing figure in a pivotal age will arouse the immemorial questions most associated with fiction and drama. Henry Ford was such a figure, and the automobile’s dawn such an age.

Snow centers his story here, on Ford’s mechanical genius and equal gift for recognizing talent. From that spool we see the morphology of man to monster as Ford devolves from the genial, democratic leader who revolutionized labor production to the reactionary tyrant who nearly destroyed all he created. Though by the end Ford didn’t quite achieve Macbeth’s isolated thuggery, Shakespeare might have staged a masterpiece from his life. Throughout, of course, is the automobile, which evaporated the rustic American tempo Ford adored to whisk in the mechanized swivet he despised. Such ironies define him, and Snow makes them his themes.

He starts with nostalgia. By building the still operational Greenfield Village, Ford desperately tried to preserve the bucolic idealism into which he was born and that the automobile and mass production he largely created obliterated. If we blame today’s erosion of the nuclear family on everything from sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll to social media, we forget that the affordable car — Ford’s Model T — was fingered by contemporaries as the family unit’s serpent in the Garden. Despite its quaint ethnocentrism, then, John Steinbeck’s insight into the automobile’s pathogenic agency still haunts:

“Most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born in them. The theory of the Anglo-Saxon home became so warped that it never quite recovered.”

Snow has a gift for framing such quotes to emphasize the maelstrom both Ford and his machine were — and are — to American life. Meeting Ford toward the end of both their lives, Will Rogers said, “It will take a hundred years to tell whether you have helped us or hurt us. But you certainly didn’t leave us where you found us.” A hundred years later that question persists, something not lost on Snow.

At its best, too, biography presents the past to inform the present. It’s impossible to guess what Ford would make of today’s ideological mischiefs, but it’s worth trying. A capitalist tycoon, he was conversely nearly socialist, instituting a nanny-like protrusion into employees’ lives that would make Mike Bloomberg look libertarian. While a ruthless competitor and brow-beating goon later in life, Ford despised war, soldiers, and the countries for whom they fought. One quote in part prefigures John Lennon’s “Imagine”: “I think nations are silly and I think flags are silly, too. In this country, most soldiers are lazy, crazy, or just out of a job.”

Rather than simple profile, the biography plumbs the man who more than any other made factory hands from farmers. In the telling, questions of leadership, the peril and potency of capital, and the nature of America itself arise, all freighted frictions regarding our current travails. Snow answers nothing, but clarifies each ponderable remarkably well through the kaleidoscopic Henry Ford.

“I INVENTED THE MODERN AGE: The Rise of Henry Ford,” by Richard Snow. Scribner. $30.